This 16-year-old kid fell behind in math class, so he built an app to do it for him

It was during his freshman year of high school that Amit Kalra
started falling behind in math class.

But it wasn't because he couldn't handle it. Kalra, now 16, had
been transferred to a new school where he was put into an algebra
class he had already taken. And by the time he convinced his mom
to put him back in the old school, he was halfway behind in
geometry, a subject he wasn't familiar with.

"I started struggling," Kalra told Business Insider. “I was on my
own. I didn’t know anyone in the class.”

Most kids would have given up and resigned themselves to summer
school, or maybe even studied extra hard just to get by.

Kalra decided to build an app that would do all his math homework
for him.

The coding of '6284 Calc'

In May 2015, Kalra started working on what would become his iOS
app, 6284 Calc. Needless to say, it's not like any other
calculator app you've ever seen.

That's because it's specifically made to take the guesswork out
of algebra, geometry, calculus, and other subjects, by allowing
users to input the values into the given formula, letting the app
do the rest. And for a one time in-app purchase of $1.99, it will
even give you all the steps it took to get there.

"What if this app just does the work for them?" Kalra asked of
students who may be struggling like he was, thinking they might
just skip homework. "They just have to spend five minutes a day
entering values. It’s better than turning in nothing.”

6284 Calc

Kalra didn't have much iOS coding knowledge before 6284 Calc,
except for little test projects like a random lottery number
generator app he built for his dad. He ended up teaching himself
how to code by downloading an ebook and experimenting.

But just roughly four months after he began, Kalra released 6284
Calc — the numbers represent M-A-T-H on a telephone keypad — and
he's been updating it ever since.

“Every time I learn something in class, the first thing I do
instead of doing the homework, I would actually go work on it in
the app first," he said.

Since the app's release, it's had about 30,000 downloads, though
Kalra has done little marketing other than to text all his
friends to try it out.

It also caught the attention of Apple, which invited
him to attend the Worldwide Developer Conference earlier this
year.

Going from gamer to coder

Kalra's story of app coding goes back a little bit further to
when he was a typical teenager playing video games. One of his
favorites was Roblox, a massive multiplayer online game that
allows players to explore inside a virtual world.

And as most teens can relate, his parents weren't all that
approving of his hobby. "What are you doing all day?" was a
common refrain. But he learned that he could also build his own
worlds and games inside Roblox when he was 12, so he downloaded
an ebook and decided to give it a shot.

"That's where my interest for coding came in," Kalra said, since
Roblox encourages "you to make your own games.”

It took him about six months. The result was Parkour City, a big
open city-like space where users could jump around and do all
kinds of flips and other moves. Though it's taken a while to get
noticed, this summer it hit the 1 million visit mark, and it's
been on Roblox's top charts.

I asked Kalra what he's planning to do after high school. He said
that for now, 6284 Calc is his main focus, but he might try to
work on something new. Though plans to go to college might
not be in the cards: “I don’t know if college would be beneficial
to me," he said.

For a teenager who can download some books and just figure things
out, that calculation may turn out to be just right.